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CNN has pointed out that Oracle is attempting to buy BEA Systems at $17 a share, a 25% premium over the normal share price.
From CNN:

"We believe our all cash offer provides the best value for BEA's shareholders and the best home for BEA's employees and customers," said a statement from Oracle President Charles Phillips. "This proposal is the culmination of repeated conversations with BEA's management over the last several years. We look forward to completing a friendly transaction as soon as possible."

"We believe our all cash offer provides the best value for BEA's shareholders and the best home for BEA's employees and customers," said a statement from Oracle President Charles Phillips.

Translation: We will assimilate your customer portfolio, migrate all of your customers to our superior stack, and you can all run off and go look for jobs in India.
I don't know BEA's entire product portfolio, but it seems odd for Oracle to maintain duplicate offerings in the long-run.
Roy Russo
http://www.loopfuse.com

I wonder what will be the oracle marketing idea when they have bought BEA. So many redundancies : application server, process servers, soa stacks and so on.
Some stacks will have to die (let's hope it will be the old oracle one). Another issue is the bad track record oracle has when buying out external product. They almost kill them all at the end. Oracle technical reputation outside the db is pretty low.

I completely agree with you Jose. If this deal goes through, they'll crap it up like all of their other Oracle products. If configuring an Oracle-branded WLS is as complicated as submitting my expenses through Oracle's financial tools, WebLogic is done for.
The Oracle application teams have an awful lot to learn about usability. While I'm not the biggest fan of BEA, they do make a decent product as their own entity. Such a move can only help Microsoft, IBM, and RedHat. So in a way, it could be a good thing :)

BEA SOA/Enteprise Application stack is vastly superior to Oracle ones... Oracle will get rid of its own stack in favor of BEA ones in couple of years.
The migration will bring loads of revenue to Oracle on consulting services :-).

BEA is a company got luck with internet boom time frame
1. BEA do not have good marketing people
2. BEA do not have products address all aspects of IT computing with what ever their opponent do ( such as IBM)
3. BEA got application server from WEBLOGIC
4. BEA got portal from some other company in Boston
5. BEA got WLI from some where else
6. BEA has failed put FUGO into their SOA tool framework
7. BEA is running out of money
8. BEA managers are not ready to leave their arrogant attitude
On other side
1. Oracle products sucks
2. Oracle marketing people are smart
3. Oracle has wide range of products to match with their opponents
4. Recent DEAL Oracle has with GM, by making them to by FUsion platform make it clear stupid CTOS of companies never care about quality of the product.
5. Oracle need an application server, which is stable and neat to open their dirty mouth against companies like SAP.
So it is good for everybody that Oracle is buying BEA. BEA stock holder's will get some money
Oracle has another chance to survive in middleware market.
Some more Indian guys will get job in Oracle Bangalore office.
BEA arrogant managers can move to some construction work, painting, real estate etc in USA ( I think they are just worth for that only)

1. BEA do not have good marketing people2. BEA do not have products address all aspects of IT computing with what ever their opponent do ( such as IBM)3. BEA got application server from WEBLOGIC4. BEA got portal from some other company in Boston5. BEA got WLI from some where else6. BEA has failed put FUGO into their SOA tool framework7. BEA is running out of money8. BEA managers are not ready to leave their arrogant attitude

Shaji - where go you get your facts from? You are reciting these points as though you have first-hand knowledge BEA. For the record, I worked for BEA and have a better idea of where each product comes from and the passionate people behind each. I don't want to debate each of these points here, but I would suggest better fact checking.

Pull out the records dude.
I do not have any bad experience, but I do stand against Arrogant stupid *** Holes, that is what my patents taught me (Be right, straight forward and believe in truth).
Yes I have worked in BEA; I can work in their any products. I have tremendous examples across America to show how stupid their professional service people are. How stupid their managers are, at the same time I also have tremendous number of fortune 100 clients in USA know my names very well for BEA or any major vendor's products.
All I am saying it is BEA is not a company can stand against IBM, Oracle, HP etc. Also they got luck in a lucky time of .com. A company is not just a product they got cheap from another San Jose apartment complex. A company is a combination of a lot of CAPABILITIES. There is a different between capabilities and activities.
In SOA world, if we take BEA, IBM and Oracle, first one can only do activity services, but rest of the two can do both.

One more reason for smart design of your apps. Do not use specifics of tools. Lets take BEA WLI database control. Wery nice! But abstract that to the level where it can be used in any x app server, not only on WL integration, because sooner or later your favorite server will be "merged" with someone.
BEA did something similar with version skip from 8.1 to 9.2. Poorly designed apps are imposible to port, or as hard to port as port to Oracle AS.
Trust no one.

Clearly, the writer exaggerates here. JDO is hardly the leading persistence model in the marketplace. It was specifically excluded from the JPA because of many deficiencies. JDO was written primarily for OO databases and we know how well those have done in the marketplace. The vision of JDO was admirable and some of the folks behind it are well-intentioned but it fell by the wayside, fairly or not. If it works well for you -- great. But if you look at what is happening today in the enterprise, Toplink and Hibernate own the mindshare of persistence.

No, at all.
It was written primarly to be datastore agnostic.
In fact, 99.999999999999% of the JDO implementations were
and are ORMs.

and we know how well those have done in the marketplace. The vision of JDO was admirable and some of the folks behind it are well-intentioned but it fell by the wayside, fairly or not. If it works well for you -- great. But if you look at what is happening today in the enterprise, Toplink and Hibernate own the mindshare of persistence.

Let's say that there are a lot people pushing buzzwords,
together to other that deliberately choose Toplink and Hibernate.
The latter being a fraction of the former.
Guido

Well -- I feel the passion of the JDO crowd here. Admirable but misplaced. If JDO were so great why is the JPA not based on JDO? You had your chance to convince everyone via the JCP for the JSR that it should be. The collective wisdom of the community rejected such a stance.
JDO is database agnostic BECAUSE it wanted to open the possibility of deploying OODBS's which at the time of the original JDO spec were supposed to be "the next big wave" and of course were not.
My comment about the use of JDO in the enterprise is unrefuted and unrefuteable. It is just not factual to believe that Hibernate and Toplink do not hold the vast majority of the market share in the enterprise. How many high volume (100,000 transactions per second say), complex data state management applications out there use JDO?
I would respond to your second to last sentence but it makes no sense. I also wonder if you know former from latter. If the sentence fragment is "... Toplink and Hibernate", former= Toplink and latter = Hibernate. Do you mean what you said essentially, "Hibernate is a fraction of Toplink"? In any case, both are great tools for the job, though I personally prefer Toplink for many reasons.
Like all things in life, vision and execution and acceptance are very different things. Nothing wrong with the JDO vision to a certain extent. The execution was uneven: some good, some not so good. Acceptance was small. Those are the facts. The beauty of technology (in JAVA world at least) is that noone is forcing anything down your throat. Everyone is entitled to decide what they like to use and why. Enjoy JDO -- noone is going to arrest you. Just look at it with clear vision: small niche and limited influence.

Politics and practicality. JDO has a very rich set of object states and transitions, and a lot of flexibility. Why would relational database vendors (the majority of those wanting to implement a persistence API) be interested in such flexibility? JPA was probably far easier to implement above existing persistence engines, and was also easier to tie in with the clear market leader - Hibernate.

You had your chance to convince everyone via the JCP for the JSR that it should be. The collective wisdom of the community rejected such a stance.

Hardly. Anyone who followed the processed would have seen a huge amount of controversy. BEA voted for acceptance of the JDO 2.0 specification because of their opinion of the size of the JDO community. Nothing compared to Hibernate, of course, but still there.

Politics and practicality. JDO has a very rich set of object states and transitions, and a lot of flexibility. Why would relational database vendors (the majority of those wanting to implement a persistence API) be interested in such flexibility? JPA was probably far easier to implement above existing persistence engines, and was also easier to tie in with the clear market leader - Hibernate.

You had your chance to convince everyone via the JCP for the JSR that it should be. The collective wisdom of the community rejected such a stance.

Hardly. Anyone who followed the processed would have seen a huge amount of controversy. BEA voted for acceptance of the JDO 2.0 specification because of their opinion of the size of the JDO community.

Maybe for the intent to buy Solarmetric.....
Even if they made and are still doing all their best to hide the fact that Kodo is a JDO implementaion too.
Guido

Even if they made and are still doing all their best to hide the fact that Kodo is a JDO implementaion too.

Guido

They are?
Right at the top of BEA's Kodo page:
"Complete JDO 2.0 support. Java Persistence API (JPA) based on same code from the Apache OpenJPA incubator project."
Sure does not look like hiding to me.

Never take a look at their support forum ?
Have you ever seen any announce of the reached compliance ?
I still remember the critiques on TSS when BEA decided to
open source a JPA implementation keeping JDO closed source.
I still remember the critiques on TSS about the delays of
Kodo 4 in reaching the compliance.
They said something like JDO is much more complex than JPA (instead of saying that maybe it was not wise to have a well-working persistence solution not named JPA) and it took more time to reach compliance (JDO 2 proposed final draft was issued about 1 year before).
Yes, they still have the acronym on top.
OK, let's say that it doesn't seem to be a proper commitment in certain product management.
Or, maybe, cleanup procedure didn't work properly.
Guido

, let's say that it doesn't seem to be a proper commitment in certain product management.Or, maybe, cleanup procedure didn't work properly.

Guido

I really don't get your point. They produced a very high quality JDO 2.0 implementation, which they continue to support, and which I have been using for development and production systems for some time. I saw no lack of committment. If I ever decide to transition to JPA, the Kodo extensions will mean I can continue using the power of JDO.

, let's say that it doesn't seem to be a proper commitment in certain product management.Or, maybe, cleanup procedure didn't work properly.

Guido

I really don't get your point. They produced a very high quality JDO 2.0 implementation, which they continue to support, and which I have been using for development and production systems for some time. I saw no lack of committment. If I ever decide to transition to JPA, the Kodo extensions will mean I can continue using the power of JDO.

I know very well Kodo high quality. I have used too.
As far as I can see from the post in Kodo forum I don't see
all that interest in having a JDO based community.
Nothing compared to what was Kodo when it was branded Solarmetric.
Guido

Well -- I feel the passion of the JDO crowd here. Admirable but misplaced. If JDO were so great why is the JPA not based on JDO? You had your chance to convince everyone via the JCP for the JSR that it should be. The collective wisdom of the community rejected such a stance.

Collective wisdom ? Wisdom ?
OK, stop here. The topic is another.

JDO is database agnostic BECAUSE it wanted to open the possibility of deploying OODBS's which at the time of the original JDO spec were supposed to be "the next big wave" and of course were not.

My comment about the use of JDO in the enterprise is unrefuted and unrefuteable. It is just not factual to believe that Hibernate and Toplink do not hold the vast majority of the market share in the enterprise. How many high volume (100,000 transactions per second say), complex data state management applications out there use JDO?

I would respond to your second to last sentence but it makes no sense. I also wonder if you know former from latter. If the sentence fragment is "... Toplink and Hibernate", former= Toplink and latter = Hibernate. Do you mean what you said essentially, "Hibernate is a fraction of Toplink"?

No, sorry. English is not my mother tongues so my intent
has been clearly misunderstood.
Latter and former were referred to people: those who
deliberately choose Hibernate, Toplink or JPA are a fraction
of those who simply use buzzwords.

In any case, both are great tools for the job, though I personally prefer Toplink for many reasons.

Like all things in life, vision and execution and acceptance are very different things. Nothing wrong with the JDO vision to a certain extent. The execution was uneven: some good, some not so good. Acceptance was small. Those are the facts. The beauty of technology (in JAVA world at least) is that noone is forcing anything down your throat. Everyone is entitled to decide what they like to use and why. Enjoy JDO -- noone is going to arrest you. Just look at it with clear vision: small niche and limited influence.

Yes, surely.
And I have enjoyed with Hibernate too (well, a little less I have to admit).
What I can't stand are certain false statements, such as

It was specifically excluded from the JPA because of many deficiencies.

JDO was specifically excluded from the JPA because of many deficiencies.

Because JDO has by far much richer support to RDBMSs than JPA, I would say that's a joke, right?
Anyway, the topic here is another one. Hopefully, Oracle will drop their horrible OracleAQ and its JMS implementation.

Good news for everyone, except for websphere.
Weblogic is the best quality j2ee server. Websphere is the worst one. On the market side, Websphere is stronger than Weblogic because the name of IBM. Now, the name of Weblogic Oracle) is as good as IBM, if not better, so Websphere has to improve its quality.
Wei Jiang
J2EE tools

How good the app server is has nothing to do with it. The point is there is no money in app server licenses anymore.
The money comes from contracting, consulting, support and business applications working over it. That is why BEA's and Oracle's app servers are turkeys, no money to be made.

App servers are the commodity.. it's the consulting where the money is..

I say.. go Tomcat and Spring Services.. dump WLS or OAS!

:)

+1
I never work with WLS, but OAS is VERY ugly, JBoss isn't bad at all (almost 4.0.* versions), GlassFish looks promising...
But Since I work with Tomcat and Spring, my life is better, I'm a happy man.
BTW in the past year, if my memory don't fall, Oracle try to Buy JBoss before Red Hat.... I'm wrong?

LOL
(Funny, there were 2 replies when I was going to post exactly
the same thing).
+1
+1
+1
(I am fighting with JBOSS and it is a real pain if you would
like to do something slightly different from their model)
Guido

(I am fighting with JBOSS and it is a real pain if you wouldlike to do something slightly different from their model)

Guido

I hear you on that JBoss comment - seems increasingly to be the norm for how JBoss products are evolved now (i.e. annoying breakages, much arrogance from the core developers, the usual non-existent or not-useful documentation for a marginal feature that some developer can't stop blogging about, and so on...) Oh well - at least you can get and use the JBoss 'stuff' for free if you want.

I hear you on that JBoss comment - seems increasingly to be the norm for how JBoss products are evolved now (i.e. annoying breakages, much arrogance from the core developers, the usual non-existent or not-useful documentation for a marginal feature that some developer can't stop blogging about, and so on...) Oh well - at least you can get and use the JBoss 'stuff' for free if you want.

I have to second that opinion.
I'v been trying out glassfish v2 for about a month now, and my experiences have been generally very positive; overall stability, design and documentation are all top notch, it clusters just as easily as any, the developers are friendly and responsive, and there is really nice admin gui.
I'll be moving first site to production soon, and unless something explodes Glassfish will replace JBoss completely at the low-end on all future projects where customer don't want to pay for WebLogic prices.
/Henri Karapuu

Well several years ago Oracle bought the Orion Server and through out the very bad oracle j2ee container. Over the intervening years they have slowly replaced the orion code with their own. The last release of 10gAS, 10.1.3, has no orion code left and was so unusable that even Oracle did not upgrade their own sites.
Looks like the need a new code base to start over with again. This would be goo in the short term for Oracle, but bad for BEA.
Oh well, use Glassfish/Sun Java Server 9.1 for a lot less than either Oracle or BEA.

Yes, every release is a let's refactor everything and break all the ears and wars that worked on the previous release fest. It doesn't matter that 4.0.x to 4.2.x is a point release, we can change all the contracts! Thanks Gavin!
I think I am going to check out Glassfish.

Well, hope Oracle will throw their iAS out and leverage WLS. Having worked few Years with WLS and, in current company which is Oracle shop, working with iAS, I must say iAS is single most bloated thing I've ever seen... Anyway good news to me, maybe we could sneak in the near feature WLS as "Oracle" product ;)).

Just what was needed and a great move for both companies, i can't think of a more necessary enterprise software move than to get WebLogic in to all Oracle database accounts, and fund AquaLogic expansion and integration...
good call, Chuck Phillips, now its up to Alfred and co. to take the bait and give up this pointless quest to be everything to everyone, they need an installed base badly, and what better than pre-baked Oracle accounts....
how Fusion is integrated (or cast off) with WebLogic products may seem daunting, but since this is Java and SOA, it should be simple as plugging in, right? :) Truly, WebLogic will become the base for all JEE, and the rest of Fusion will be for the apps...
the question mark is over-lapping SOA/BPM/ESB stacks, but here, BEA seems like it has better technology, while Oracle has the IDM, Apps, and Database, this is just one of those moments of no-brainer execution in the software market...

WebLogic has been good from the start with EJB 1.1, 2.0, and 2.1. Now with EJB 3.0, several other JEE application servers are finally getting it right.
Wondering, has any non Oracle and IBM IT shops picked these vendors JEE application server based on merit alone?
Don't think so, Oracle Application Server usually layers between JSP and PL/SQL mess with business logic all over the place. While Websphere normally serves as a bloated JMS MQ provider fronting classic JSP hacks.
In my experience, WebLogic was the only (Borland Application Server was great also) viable "EJB" container to really work.
Now using GlassFish and it works great! And with the Java Business Integration (JBI) Open ESB stack, life is good.
SUN has done a phenomenal job with Open ESB, experiences and lessons learned from the SeeBeyond crew has really paid off.
Folks should give GlassFish, Open ESB and NetBeans a test drive - these are not typical SUN junk offerings from the past.

Wondering, has any non Oracle and IBM IT shops picked these vendors JEE application server based on merit alone?

none that I have met or talked to, seriously, I have asked this same question hundreds and hundreds of times both internally and outside to colleagues and acquaintances, and the best that I can get is "it's not that bad". What this is indicative of is how good marketing and sales are in these companies to the C-level execs that govern down without properly balancing centralized/decentralized concerns at an architectural level.
Personally, I am more than enthusiastic about GlassFish, not just in its capabilities, but in its approach. I've also been personally making the transition to Netbeans. After years of wasted space on my hard drive using WSAD, then RSA/RAD, eclipse, MyEclipse (best of the bunch IMO), I'm ready for a change. I've personally been using Websphere in a production environment since 3.5, and not by choice.
I think those that haven't given GlassFish a try will be pleasantly surprised. We have already done a proof of concept port from an application that runs in WAS 5.1/6.1 and it was as smooth as butter, with none of the thorns.

I've had the unfortunate experience of developing in OC4J 9x and later migrate to 10G(it was not completed, entity findall method returns duplicates ?) and had the firsthand experience of oracle customer support.Lot of swearing and closing the TAR after 14 days no matter what, it is your responsibility to provide a test case. OJC doesn't even compile the java 5 examples, if you pass anytype as method parameter.
Oracle app server and their support is a joke.

What will be the message to customers of Oracle AS? Should we wait before we buy new stuff or get web logic products before they become a part of Oracle's portfolio. As many people in this thread said, there are overlaps in the stack and only one of the product lines will survive in the long run and ofcourse it also carries all the migration nightmares.
Ramana

A few years ago, the whole Java engineering staff could not come up with a viable J2EE application server. So they bought a cut of code from Orion (www.OrionServer.com). That was a very good move on behalf of Oracle and the few people that built Orion finally got a real paycheck.
So the question is: Why would they buy yet another J2EE application server when they just bought one a few years ago?
I know BEA is not just an application server, but the infiltration of WebLogic into the corporate world is deep. Most shops here in Tampa use either WebSphere or WebLogic.
Oracle's power & cash goes from their database line. And I have to admit that their IDE is very nice.

I hope they throw away their efforts on OAS and just adopt Weblogic as their only offering.
Besides the other offerings from BEA add a lot of value to their set of products. Most of the BEA products are really good platforms to build on..
Say again "Build On?"

My Opinion
SAP buying BEA will be much cleaner then Oracle as per my knowledge as they do not have any rival products and hence it will be fresh start for them rather then Oracle buying BEA and then getting lost of what to merge what to throw
What are your opinions?
Regards,
Shabbir

Oracle surely will have business benefits with this acquisition as -
1) Oracle will eliminate a very big competitor.
2) Oracle portal is quite old and is in the edge of retirement and Oracle Webcenter is new in the portal market and is more developer centric. Oracle will revive with having aqualogic and weblogic in its main portal product stream
3) With Aqualogic and Weblogic from BEA, Oracle surely will have more and better products to sell.
4) As BEA Weblogic application server leads the middleware market and Oracle standalone application server lags far behind. Selling Bea appserver is going to add huge $$$ in Oracle’s account.
5) Oracle will also get boost to its SOA strategies, as both the companies have invested heavily on the SOA paradigm.
Lokesh
http://lokeshpant.blogspot.com/2007/10/oracle-bea-portalsportals-everywhere.html

The real reason of the offer is that Oracle wants to strengthen its position in middle ware market.
Despite the advertisement and marketing docs at Oracle site, Oracle Application Server is the second worst application server in the whole industry (The worst is IBM Web Sphere).
And to tell the truth, all the Oracle Enterprise Applications, such as Collaboration Suite, Oracle HR, iProcurement ... are terrible, because Oracle doesn't know how to produce high performance, reliable and easy-to-use software.
Besides, recently, Oracle buys a lot of start-up with some good business ideas but with horrible implementations, so it wants to consolidate those things under a better J2EE Application Server than the second worst OAS.
But in fact, Oracle needs a new Chief Architect with some real life experience to replace the dreamer who knows only theory about software design, and knows absolutely nothing about User Interface.

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